November 9, 2010

I just checked this into yum on friday. It’s currently defaulting to off but I wanted to mention it so it gets more testing.

if you set:

clean_requirements_on_remove = 1

in your yum.conf under [main]

or use:

–setopt=clean_requirements_on_remove=1

on the command line, then yum will remove no-longer-needed dependencies of pkgs that you are removing from your system.

Yum was sorta able to do this with the remove-with-leaves plugin but remove-with-leaves did kinda a poor job of it and we weren’t using the ‘reason’ info we’re now storing in the yumdb to know what is a dep and what is not.

Now we are. I’ve tested this in some kinda bizarre scenarios and it seems to work right but I’d appreciate more testing.

Yum that went into rawhide today (3.2.28-13) has this patch and testing (and filing bugs) is appreciated.